Variational Regularization and Fusion of Surface Normal Maps

In this work we propose an optimization scheme for variational, vectorial denoising and fusion of surface normal maps. These are common outputs of shape from shading, photometric stereo or single image reconstruction methods, but tend to be noisy and request post-processing for further usage. Processing of normals maps, which do not provide knowledge about the underlying scene depth, is complicated due to their unit length constraint which renders the optimization non-linear and non-convex. The presented approach builds upon a linearization of the constraint to obtain a convex relaxation, while guaranteeing convergence. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm generates more consistent representations from estimated and potentially complementary normal maps.